Was Gaza in urgent need of food aid in the first place?

While we try to figure out who did what to whom aboard the Mavi Mara "Freedom Flotilla" ship there is another part of the narrative that remains inviolate, unchallenged. This is the idea that Gazans are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, in urgent need of the 10,000 tonnes of food aid being rushed to them. I don't buy that part of the canon anymore than I'm ready to call the guys aboard the top deck of the Mavi "peace activists". (NB: I do make a distinction between the ambush brigade on the top deck and the Birkenstock ladies who cowered below. )

I let this belief slip in my last post by putting the qualifier "unneeded" before "food aid", and a few Telegraph Blogs readers went ballistic. I can't blame them too much – they're only parroting what they've heard from the international aid brigade. What I'd like these folks to consider is that aid workers have jobs which are dependent on there being a crisis in Gaza. Take away the crisis, no more photos to put on the stationary, no more NGO. The oldest of these poverty pimps, is, of course, UNWRA, the arm of the UN created in 1948 to supply homes, food, medical care, even education to the Arab Palestinians (prior to 1948 Jews were referred to as "Palestinians" as well) who fled Palestine during the '48 Israel/Arab Legion war. Like many aid programs UNWRA was originally supposed to be temporary but because it had so much largesse to distribute and because its programs are eligible to those defining themselves as descendants of 1948 refugees, its rolls increase exponentially every year and the initiative shows no signs of ever shutting down.

Certain politicians also huff and puff about "Warsaw Ghetto-like" conditions in the Strip. Apparently they get a good deal of satisfaction out of having discovered this supposed moral equivalency. But these are politicians who have generally been whisked down for a few hours between EU conferences and and taken on sort of reverse Potemkin Village-style tours. (If the original Potemkin Village was meant to show happy villagers, these are meant to prove misery.) In my experience reporting in the region, visiting politicians generally ask few questions about the their tour guides. So, almost without exception, they end up trailing sheep-like and agog after officials of which ever oligarchy is in charge at the moment, whether it is Hamas or Fatah.

The point is, there are an awful lot of Westerners heavily invested in there being a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip and that helps perpetuate this unshakable pillar of the narrative.

Now, I generally believe journalists should have first-hand experience on subjects they opine about, so I regret that I can't give you a more definitive word about conditions based on direct observation. My excuse is that everytime I've been in the region recently a journalist had just been kidnapped and it was considered too dangerous — especially for an unaccompanied woman, who's Western (read shameless abomination-deserving-of-anything-she-gets) bearing a passport fatally marked with a Jewish last name. (This may be a revelation for some Blogs readers but I'm not actually Jewish; my mother was Christian.)

Here, then, is what has made me a sceptic on the Gaza-is-starving issue:

One piece of data was a documentary I saw a few months ago, shot by a pro-Hamas activist and screened during Columbia University's Apartheid Week festivities. Peculiarly, though the travelogue (filmed very recently) was supposed to arouse Nuremberg rally-like rage about occupation and so on, the activist/producer had allowed abundant footage of street markets brimming with produce and shops full of canned goods, cigarettes, and sweets. At one point the activist/film producer asked a Gazan whether he had enough food. He answered with something to the effect of "We have food, but we object to the closures on political grounds." The activist's cameras then took us over to the Gaza/Egypt border where, under full view of apathetic uniformed authorities, huge, complicated tunnels were being built, repaired, and used to bring in more goods.

Data point two was a Sky TV series about the Middle East narrated by Ross Kemp, which I recently watched on YouTube showing similar market scenes. At one point Kemp asks a Gazan the starvation question and he replies, "Well, the Israelis give us nappies, yoghurt and fruit."

Three is the fact that every single documentary or TV news clip I have seen of Gaza shows healthy looking children frisking in the streets and robust young men busy doing calorically expensive things like loading rocket launchers. Severely under-nourished people are usually quite apathetic.

The most recent large scale delivery of aid was the 10,000 tonnes of goods off-loaded from the "Freedom Flotilla" ships in the Ashdod port and taken by ground, by Israel, to Gaza. The Israelis claim this was accomplished by the second of June, shortly after the hostilities at sea. Of course this is what was supposed to have happened anyway if the activists had cooperated with the Israeli government in the first place, and sooner, with the creation of fewer new "martyrs".